Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Posted earlier at Schools Matter:With every bad instrument in the corporate education toolbox being thrown into the creation of a new schooling Frankenstein for "educating" Memphis and Shelby County children, the introduction of test scores to determine teacher pay was inevitable.

Gone are annual scheduled salary steps, which have been replaced by annual bonuses based on student test scores.

Maximum salaries have been reduced from $73,000 to $63,000.

Teachers will max out after 18 years, with no salary increases after that.

Teachers who teach non-tested subjects must rely upon test scores averaged for those in the school who teach tested subjects to determine their pay raises.

Monday, December 1, 2014

The University of Memphis Faculty Senate will hear details of CorpEd's teacher miseducation plan tomorrow, which will divide UofM's college of education into two castes: one for teacher candidates trained to serve corporate charter schools that impose the penal "no excuses" teaching model on the children of the poor.

This group of teacher candidates are to be Relay-ed into poor and black schools after they are indoctrinated in techniques for grinding out test scores and imposing a paternalistic, inhumane behavioral and instructional regimen that seeks to culturally sterilize poor kids.

On the other wing of UofM's College of Ed, teacher preparation will continue for the other caste of teachers, who are going into the leafy suburban schools where curriculum, child development, educational theory, and educational sociology and psychology remain relevant topics.

What this new program will do, if approved, is to make University of Memphis complicit in the continued segregation and mistreatment of children in school environments that no faculty member would ever allow for their own children.

UofM's president, David Rudd, was recently appointed to his post by corporate education insiders at the state and corporate foundation levels, and it looks as though he is wasting no time in killing the legitimacy of the College of Education at the University.

Dr. David Rudd is an expert on clinical suicidology. He has served as a consultant to the United States Air Force, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense and the Beijing Suicide Prevention and Research Center. In the past year he has twice testified before the U.S. Congress on issues related to veterans’ suicide.

According to the YouTube video, Rudd at the time had a contract to study suicide prevention among veterans. I find it interesting that Rudd references "resiliency training," which is an outgrowth of Martin Seligman’s work that became the centerpiece of Seligman's big sales jobto the Army for using his ludicrous positive psychology approach to combat PTSD.

Interesting, too, are Seligman’s connections with “performance character” training for KIPP and the other total compliance charter schools. Even more interesting is the fact that Relay is using performance character resiliency training in its misedcuative teacher prep program that Rudd hopes to bring to U of M.

Could it be that Rudd has plans for big grant funding at UofM to do what Seligman and his disciple,Angela Duckworth, have done and are experimenting on children at UPenn and in the poorest schools of Philadelphia. It is a form of character resiliency training that hopes to make children living in poverty into little automatons who are impervious to the effects of poverty.

There are huge grants, both federal and private, for this kind of neurological tampering within the skulls of poor children. Will Dr. Rudd be given free rein to set up his experiments on Memphis's children of the poor?